Laurie Lee Hall - Dictates of Conscience

2024, English, Laurie Lee Hall, USA,

Full title: "Dictates of Conscience: From Mormon High Priest to My New Life as a Woman" by Laurie Lee Hall.

Laurie Lee Hall’s memoir Dictates of Conscience: From Mormon High Priest to My New Life as a Woman is a profound, often heartbreaking, and ultimately affirming account of what it means to live at the intersection of deep faith, rigid doctrine, and an inescapable inner truth. It is not merely a transition narrative, nor solely a critique of institutional religion, but a carefully constructed testament to conscience, integrity, and the cost of authenticity when one’s identity collides with an uncompromising belief system.

 

From her earliest years, Laurie Lee Hall experienced a persistent and unnameable dissonance between her body and her sense of self. Growing up in New England, she understood herself internally as a girl while being perceived and treated as a boy, a contradiction she lacked both the language and the social permission to articulate. Like many transgender people of her generation, she internalized the belief that this dissonance was something to be overcome through discipline, faith, and conformity. Rather than exploring her gender identity, she committed herself to suppressing it, believing that adulthood, structure, and religious devotion would provide resolution. This decision to bury her truth is not portrayed as weakness, but as a rational survival strategy shaped by the cultural and religious realities of her time.

 

Her encounter with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints offered what seemed to be a divinely ordered path, one that aligned perfectly with the gender role she had been assigned at birth. Mormonism’s emphasis on clearly defined roles, eternal families, and absolute moral structure gave her both purpose and an apparent solution to her inner conflict. Hall embraced the church with devotion, serving a mission, marrying, raising children, and rising steadily through ecclesiastical ranks. Professionally, she flourished as well, becoming the chief architect for the LDS Church, entrusted with overseeing the design and construction of its most sacred temples. These roles placed her at the very heart of an institution that views gender not as fluid or psychological, but as an eternal, divinely assigned characteristic.

 

What makes Dictates of Conscience particularly powerful is Hall’s refusal to frame her pre-transition life as false or meaningless. She does not deny the sincerity of her faith, the love she held for her family, or the pride she took in her work and service. Instead, she presents her life as a man as an act of profound sacrifice, undertaken in good faith and sustained at great personal cost. Yet the memoir is equally clear that repression has consequences. The longer she lived behind what she later describes as a “male disguise,” the more acute her gender dysphoria became. Success, status, and spiritual authority did not quiet the internal struggle, they only raised the stakes.

 

The turning point in Hall’s story is not rebellion, but revelation. Contrary to the assumption that transgender identity is incompatible with religious belief, Hall describes receiving spiritual confirmation that she was, and always had been, a woman. This realization did not lead her away from faith, but forced her to reexamine it at its core. The same conscience that had guided her devotion now compelled her toward authenticity. Accepting herself as transgender was not, in her telling, a rejection of God, but an act of obedience to a deeper spiritual truth. 

 

The consequences of that obedience were severe. As Hall began to socially transition and live openly as Laurie Lee, she encountered the full weight of institutional resistance. Despite her decades of service and leadership, the church refused to accommodate her transition within her employment or religious life. Losing her temple recommend effectively ended her career as the church’s architect, and her eventual excommunication severed her formal ties to the faith that had defined her adult life. The memoir does not shy away from the grief of these losses, including the dissolution of her marriage and the pain experienced by her former spouse, who received little support from the institution during the fallout.

 

Yet Hall’s story resists the simplicity of villain and victim. She recounts moments of profound kindness and grace, individual bishops and community members who embodied compassion even when the institution could not. These figures stand as reminders that systems are made of people, and that humanity can persist even within rigid structures. Particularly moving are her recollections of women who welcomed her, taught her makeup, and treated her not as a problem to be solved but as a person to be loved.

 

Since her excommunication, Hall has rebuilt her life on new terms. Relocating to Kentucky, she resumed her architectural career independently and found enduring love with her partner, Nancy Beaman. She has remained deeply engaged in advocacy, serving on the executive committee of Affirmation: LGBTQ Mormons, Families & Friends, and becoming, in 2023, the first transgender recipient of the Paul Mortensen Award for leadership within the LGBTQ Mormon-adjacent community. Her life now includes not only professional and personal renewal, but a large extended family of children and grandchildren, underscoring that transition does not erase relationships, it reshapes them.

 

Spiritually, Hall’s journey leads not to abandonment of belief, but to a redefined faith grounded in personal conscience rather than institutional approval. She writes movingly about discovering that her sense of divine connection did not vanish with her church membership. Freed from what she describes as the constant torture of gender dysphoria, she found herself more capable of compassion, service, and spiritual presence than ever before. Her assertion that ‘life is good when you’re not being tortured by your own demons,’ as told to The Salt Lake Tribune in 2025, resonates as both a personal truth and a universal insight.

 

Dictates of Conscience is ultimately a book about courage, not in the dramatic sense of defiance, but in the quieter, more difficult act of listening to oneself when doing so risks everything. Laurie Lee Hall’s memoir affirms the reality of gender identity not through abstract argument, but through the accumulated weight of lived experience. It challenges readers, particularly those within faith communities, to consider whether obedience without integrity is truly virtuous, and whether conscience might itself be sacred. In telling her story with honesty, nuance, and compassion, Hall offers not only a record of loss and resilience, but a powerful invitation to imagine a world in which faith and authenticity need not be enemies.

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